Category: Gender

I wrote this poem for a Women’s History Month event inspired by a play and film called For Coloured Girls, from which it takes its name.

Additionally, it’s inspired from “Everything is Everything” by Lauryn Hill on her album called The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

should women of colour
talk of their prophecies
of what women should be
an extension of the he
living in their ideologies
like the Male Gaze
defined by patriarchy

see I think they should live in their own realms mentally
rule their own bodies and own selves independently
free from dependency
liberate their own minds non-linearly
like space, time and astrological lines
zodiac signs in meandering minds
as mine has a sting in the tail that flails like the waves

the women I know are non-linear like the seas
not intoxicated with psychological plastic
not obsolete like some academia, kinda like the Jurassic
built for them in a roar of hypermasculine noise

but then I see some on Instagram
that store insecurity like gigabytes of ram
Snapchat and selfie culture’s peaked
Mac, Chanel, and blushed cheeks
millions of followers, thousands of likes and comments
an internet haystack of memes and shitposting content

misogynoir on Twitter and Facebook
a prejudice against black women based on looks
from Question Time to Prime Minister’s Questions
both have used racism as a tactic of deflectionAfua Hirsch, Diane Abbott and Reni Eddo-Lodge
Amma Asante and Naomi Campbell in a backlog
of anti-feminism from their own people –
the movement that tells the single narrative of she
“the danger of the single story”
well-put and defined by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

black women like graffiti on council buildings
from Cleopatra to Queen Nefertiti
Angela Bassett, Boudicca and General Okoye
Coretta Scott King, Deborah Lacks and Andrea Levy
from Mary Seacole to the Maroons and Nanny

this is where women of colour meet poetry
they always had superpowers
see she turning pain into progress
Maya Angelou, Jill Scott and Angela Davis
Ava DuVernay, Patricia Scotland,
despite obstacles like fragile masculinity
white fragility and repressed black-male sexuality
also Twitter freaks and relentless racists
and sadists that live on timelines like a bad smell
got nothing better to do, let’s face it

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This is a poem that I wrote in my head in November and only articulated it onto paper two weeks ago.

I came into contact with “Howl” years ago but I only recently engaged with it personally last January, not long after starting university.

Allen Ginsberg is one of the figures of The Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac (On The Road) and Ken Kesey (One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest).

In short, “Howl” is a declaration of personal experiences with religion, sex, drugs and society’s absurdities. Part I is about individual cases.

Part II talks about the Moloch of society, which represses feelings and forces the victim to declare themselves mad if they do not suppress the said emotions.

Part III is a proclamation of sympathy with Carl Solomon (he’s in an asylum). In that last part, Ginserg is standing in solidarity with his imprisoned friend, extending his hand in friendship. This is an act of emotion in the poem, an idea that society seems to be subjugate.

In this act of rebellion, Ginsberg is embodying an anti-establishment attitude, thus sticking it to The Man, to put it bluntly.

“Watershed” was written as a stark contrast to “Ode to the Millennial Generation” and a modern rewrite of parts one and two of “Howl”. The title comes from that time after 9pm on television when all the darker / morally-ambiguous shows arrive on air.

I

I saw the greatest people of my youth destroyed by society – pure, naked, rancour; hauling themselves through the streets in the midsummer looking for something to do,

music-headed millennials listening to the sounds of Paul Weller and Bob Marley looking for a connection to their parents’ generation,

the people who plodded through poverty and sat up smoking seeing the supernatural silhouettes of spectres floating across canopies of towns and cities in an existential crisis.

Photographer: Stas Svechnikov

These are the millennials who bared their knuckles to Snapchat and Twitter, hash-tagging their way through Wikileaks and Edward Snowden,

who passed through university swimming from the loan shark – dead eyes hallucinating like seeing giant chickens on the streets of Amsterdam,

those who cowered in cubicles making memes with nooses to hide their depression –

today’s kids who advertise their beards and long hair like Gandalf posing on the cover of Vogue.

They’re confused, like fish seeing land for the very first time, along with dreams, drugs and disillusionment. Walking nightmares, alcohol and one night stands that turn into functional relationships

on the blind avenues of a sporadic cloud and thunder in the landscapes of Bangkok and Melbourne, illuminating the rude awakening of real life.

Photographer: SHTTEFAN

Rookie soldiers of the twenty-ones to thirty-fours, responsibility and family life dawns while wine drunkenness catches their eye –

joyriding and jaywalking with no care, sun and moon and nature’s touch in the season of orange in Central Park, as poets and actors preach in the streets,

as feminists protest like Civil Rights activists marching from Selma to Montgomery under the threat of dog’s teeth and tear gas and police chants and horses and riot shields and batons and the legacy of Jim Crow,

and the millennials would yawp and whisper war stories about when they’d been arrested and on which march – the shocks of A & E, jail and combat – whole minds deteriorating in a seven-day layover with prison food, like vomit from concentrate,

those who disappeared into the cracks of Birmingham. Broad Street and New Street, leaving a trail of blood to the Rep Theatre,

watching poverty run riot by the riverside restaurants, as the homeless wander asking for change so they can live another day.

Photographer: Spenser H

The millennials who jump in taxis to go two minutes down a road, those who lay hungry and broke in cafés talking about literature,

and those conversations disappeared into the tattooed trees on the table and into the local narratives and told tales of Northampton, Bedford and Cambridge,

and further still – into the West Country of Devon, Dorset and Somerset, places that investigate newcomers and make you forget city life and its liquid lunches,

inflicting scorch marks on the anticlimactic nature of capitalism in The West – places where police create more black stars than Hollywood,

millennials who broke down in jail cells and wailed like sirens when they just happened to be wearing a hoody in a white neighbourhood –

who were raped by those who preyed on low self-esteem, taken advantage of like the slaves who worked the plantations in Mississippi and Morant Bay.

Photographer: Maciej Ostrowski

But the millennials went on partying through Manchester and Liverpool – a juxtaposition to the legacy of slavery. Myriads of slaves at auctions who stood all day with bloody feet.

My generation who watch Black Mirror and Westworld as Theresa May perfects the art of crashing the NHS,

the young people who read romance novels in Costa whilst plugged into bad music, who sit depressed under their own storm cloud,

who had suicidal thoughts in school and were told to get over it – like depression and anxiety were no different to burning your hand on the grill.

The generation that murmur all night, scribbling incantations on how to be happy in blank verse, who watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower like it was the story of their lives,

who cut their wrists at breakfast, lunch and dinner and were forced to open nostalgia shops when they failed, who hanged themselves in their bedrooms and were forgotten.

Photographer: Jens Thekkeveettil

The people who sang in Warsaw and retired to their beds… forever to tend their war wounds like it was 1st October 1939 all over again,

who were given daggers for their “ums” and spears for their “likes” and electroshock therapy to cure their anxiety of the tomorrow.

Camden Town and Oxford arguing on how to talk and how to live, tongues wagging from midday to midnight,

and those who dreamt up stories on the bus in long sentences, trapping the metaphors and similes with semicolons and subordinate clauses,

who boobie-trapped the verbs and nouns with dashes and commas in long sentences like Oscar Wilde.

And in the spirit of jazz in New Orleans, saxophone’s cry across the water with the tears of a thousand years of blissful adolescence, and are good to grow one thousand years more.

Photographer: Jens Thekkeveettil

II

What foul creature carved out their souls and imagination?

Society – isolation – independent loneliness and inflation. Young people screaming in their homes. Children caressed by Hollywood divinities.

Poverty sleeping in the parks. Society! Society! The nightmare of society. Loveless in its mutilated Marxism, the brutal judger of broken people.

Society, the unimaginable jail. Society, the black dog walking through the graveyard. Society with its logos of judgement and stunned governments,

whose minds are machinery; whose blood is money; whose fingers are on the nuclear codes; whose torso is a bonfire of the youth; whose souls are stocks and shares.

Society where people sit alone, scared of their own faces. Society with its containment culture and cookie-cutter flats and invisible poverty lines and fake wars –

visions, symbols and miracles down the Thames. Dreams and aspirations gone with a whole truckload of toxic political correctness and fragile masculinity.

A storm. Epiphanies, politics and religions gone as the boat flips. Despair! Years of suicides and crazy crucifixions into a haze of holy yells.

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About

So as the world looks hellbent on tearing itself apart, as the pallor of politics rears its ugly head daily, as alternative facts runs riot through the webs of the WiFi, as Trump battles Kim through the trench warfare of Twitter, as chemitrails pollute our skies, I, Tré Ventour, have set up a website for my poetic ramblings and stories.

Whether I am poking the underbelly of Britain’s bulldog by dissecting the concepts of imperialism and Empire or writing a quick verse of what happened on the bus one day or my family or making light of Teresa May’s antics through the wheat fields of her undecipherable semantics, this will be the place for my poetic ramblings.

Other themes will include politics, war, religion, Northampton, history, biography and society, and more lighthearted topics as well.